We have developed a new-generation, general-purpose digital signal processor (DSP) core with low power dissipation for use in third-generation (3G) mobile terminals. The DSP core employs a 4-way VLIW (very long instruction word) approach, as well as a dual-multiply-accumulate (dual-MAC) architecture with good orthogonality. It is able to perform both video and speech codec for 3G wireless communications at 384 k bit/sec with a power consumption of approximately 50 mW. This paper presents an overview of both the DSP core architecture and a DSP instruction set, and it also gives some application benchmarks